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Will the Internet Replace Traditional Education?
I recently met a principal at the world’s largest school.

It was a chance meeting at a community event, so you can imagine my surprise when I asked this warm, humble Indian man what he did, and he proceeded to tell me he was a principal at a school founded by his father, Jagdish Gandhi, that had just completed enrollment of 45,000 students for a single year. As a web guy, I’m used to big numbers. But in this case, we’re talking not about virtual users on a website, but thousands upon thousands of loud, excitable school kids. The City Montessori School in the town of Lucknow, India was very much a bootstrapped startup of its time. Some fifty years ago, a newly married couple set out with just 300 rupees (the equivalent of less than $10) looking to serve humanity through education.

Over in the United States, another entrepreneurial educator with roots in the sub-continent has also been on a mission to better the world through teaching. It will make it better.
Coursera's Huge Online Classes Roar Into Brazil, India and China. Berkeley Contributes Online-Learning Platform to edX - Wired Campus. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University have each contributed $30-million to the edX online-learning program, but a third university will provide technology instead.

The University of California at Berkeley is bringing a new online platform to the project.
Web is the New School - Cygnis Media. Difficult times prevail across the world with the economy in a recession and inflation at its pinnacle.

Each element of life has taken a turn or has folded according to the situation, which is why education has seen its part of highs, and lows but a revolutionary change with the advent of online education has en wrapped the world to the fullest. Online education has seen bumps and high up despite the recession. The economic dip has made education unaffordable and employment a necessity.
How education startup Coursera may profit from free courses. Earlier this week, online education startup Coursera said it added twelve new university partners and raised an additional $6 million.

When I spoke with co-founder Andrew Ng, he mentioned that possible revenue models could involve matching students with potential employers or charging students for certificates from partner universities. But a contract between Coursera and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, obtained by the Chronicle of Higher Education through a Freedom of Information Act request, provides more clarity into possible ways the startup, which is committed to offering free classes, could make money. It’s worth noting that, with a total of $22 million venture funding and just 20 people on staff, Coursera has the leeway to figure out how to create a great user experience and profit.

And Ng told the Chronicle that the list of revenue possibilities was more the result of “brainstorming” than a definite plan. Other monetization ideas include:
Consortium of Colleges Takes Online Education to New Level. Even before the expansion, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, the founders of Coursera, said it had registered 680,000 students in 43 courses with its original partners, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania.

Now, the partners will include the California Institute of Technology; Duke University; the Georgia Institute of Technology; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and the University of Virginia, where the debate over online education was cited in last’s month’s ousting — quickly overturned — of its president, Teresa A. Sullivan. Foreign partners include the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, the University of Toronto and EPF Lausanne, a technical university in Switzerland. And some of them will offer credit.
A Video Critique of Khan Academy. This is a great idea.

Dan Meyer and Justin Reich are sponsoring the MTT2K Prize. In short, this idea was inspired by John Golden and David Coffeey’s Mystery Teacher Theater 2000 in which they make a video of them watching one of the Khan Academy videos. Dan and Justin’s plan is to award a cash prizes to the best video critiques of Khan Academy videos.

Online education startups: a field guide. Online education is on a tear.

Every few weeks or so, it seems like yet another startup offering online classes announces a multimillion dollar funding round. This week, San Francisco-based UniversityNow, which provides affordable higher education degrees online, said it raised $17.3 million. In the past three months, at least seven online course startups have launched or announced funding.
Conflicted: Faculty and Online Education, 2012. Faculty members are far less excited by, and more fearful of, the recent growth of online education than are academic technology administrators, according to a new study by Inside Higher Ed and the Babson Survey Research Group.

But professors are hardly the luddites many still assume them to be. Nearly half of the 4,564 faculty members surveyed, three-quarters of whom are full-time professors, said the rise of online education excites them more than it frightens them. And while more than two-thirds of instructors said they believe that students currently learn less in online courses than they do in the classroom, other findings suggest that their estimation of online education quality stands to rise as the technology improves and more professors get firsthand experience with the medium.

A PDF copy of the study report can be downloaded here. To read the text of the report, click here.
Stanford President Hennessy and Khan Academy Founder Khan (Video) - Liz Gannes - D10. Stanford President John Hennessy and Khan Academy founder Salman Khan are coming at online education from very different angles — one is an elite institution being shaken up by experiments, the other is a widely loved upstart that’s increasingly being used in traditional schools.

In conversation with Walt Mossberg at D10, Hennessy and Khan talked about the future of the education credential; the opportunities for “flipped classroom”-style education, where class time is spent on collaboration, tutoring and projects; the move away from lectures and toward social media; and the opportunity to provide practical education for kids in a sort of “shadow school district,” as Khan called it, with classes in computer science, statistics and law. Here’s a highlight reel:
Top Schools from Berkeley to Yale Now Offer Free Online Courses. On average, it will cost $55,600 to attend Princeton, Penn, Michigan or Stanford next year.

But now you can enroll in online courses at all four universities online for free. The universities won't just be posting lectures online like MIT's OpenCourseWare project, Yale’s Open Yale Courses and the University of California at Berkeley’s Webcast.
Coursera Raises $16 Million To Bring Free Online Education to Millions. Stanford Professors Launch Online University Coursera - Liz Gannes. There seems to be something in the water at Stanford University that’s making faculty members leave their more-than-perfectly-good jobs and go teach online.

Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng are on leave to launch Coursera, which will offer university classes for free online, in partnership with top schools. Mountain View, Calif.
-based Coursera is backed with $16 million in funding led by John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Scott Sandell at NEA. It has no immediate plans to charge for courses or to make money in other ways.
The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever. Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig in the basement of Thrun's guesthouse, where they record class videos.Photo: Sam Comen Stanford doesn’t want me.

I can say that because it’s a documented fact: I was once denied admission in writing. I took my last math class back in high school. Which probably explains why this quiz on how to get a computer to calculate an ideal itinerary is making my brain hurt. I’m staring at a crude map of Romania on my MacBook. Last fall, the university in the heart of Silicon Valley did something it had never done before: It opened up three classes, including CS221, to anyone with a web connection. People around the world have gone crazy for this opportunity. Aside from computer-programming AI-heads, my classmates range from junior-high school students and humanities majors to middle-aged middle school science teachers and seventysomething retirees.

Solid understanding? That stuff’s all easier said than done.
Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos. This must-watch video is from our friend Derek Muller, physics educator and science video blogger. Derek writes: It is a common view that “if only someone could break this down and explain it clearly enough, more students would understand.” Khan Academy is a great example of this approach with its clear, concise videos on science. However it is debatable whether they really work. Research has shown that these types of videos may be positively received by students.
Khan Academy Gets $5 Million to Expand Faculty & Platform & to Build a Physical School. Mathemagician Vi Hart Explains Spirals and Fibonacci Numbers in Doodles and Vegetables. Stanford Professor Gives Up Teaching Position, Hopes to Reach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up - Wired Campus. The Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial-intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his teaching position to aim for an even bigger audience.

Sebastian Thrun, a research professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he had given up his teaching role at the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes.
Learn How Model Thinking Can Make You a Better Thinker. The future of teaching: Difference engine: Let the games begin. Why Get a Pricey Diploma When a Badge Will Do?
4 Reasons Your Brain Loves to Learn Online. In 2011: How the Internet Revolutionized Education. As connection speeds increase and the ubiquity of the Web pervades, free education has never been so accessible. An Internet connection gives lifelong learners the tools to become autodidacts, eschewing exorbitant tuition and joining the ranks of other self-taught great thinkers in history such as Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen and Ernest Hemingway.

Virtual Schools Booming As States Mull Warnings. DENVER -- More schoolchildren than ever are taking their classes online, using technology to avoid long commutes to school, add courses they wouldn't otherwise be able to take – and save their school districts money. But as states pour money into virtual classrooms, with an estimated 200,000 virtual K-12 students in 40 states from Washington to Wisconsin, educators are raising questions about online learning. States are taking halting steps to increase oversight, but regulation isn't moving nearly as fast as the virtual school boom. The online school debate pits traditional education backers, often teachers' unions, against lawmakers tempted by the promise of cheaper online schools and school-choice advocates who believe private companies will apply cutting-edge technology to education.

The Cassiopeia Project: Free Science Education Online. By Maria Popova What a mysterious retired physicist has to do with the future of learning. In 2008, The Cassiopeia Project began quietly publishing high-definition videos exploring in an intelligent yet digestible manner nearly every corner of the science spectrum, and releasing them online for free. With more than 100 videos to date available on iTunesU and YouTube, the project offers an invaluable resource on everything from quantum mechanics to evolution to the theory of relativity — another wonderful piece in the ever-expanding puzzle of free educational content online that is changing how we think about learning.

An Explainer Post There's an article in this month's Wired Magazine about Khan Academy. The headline speaks volumes -- "How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education" -- as do the responses I've seen to the article.
The Wrath Against Khan: Why Some Educators Are Questioning Khan Academy. Khan Academy founder: “Helping people is more important than making money”
Khan Academy Triples Unique Users To 3.5 Million. Today at The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Founder of Khan Academy, Salman Khan, took the stage to share a few quick stats on the growth of his online video education platform.